


of pariahs and lovers

by foundCarcosa



Category: Dragon Age
Genre: Other
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-11-06
Updated: 2012-11-07
Packaged: 2017-11-18 03:56:57
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 2,779
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/556634
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/foundCarcosa/pseuds/foundCarcosa
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Siobhan Hawke has struggled with identity their entire life. Only in a city like Kirkwall could they find someone who'd understand without trying.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. pariahs;

She drifts to the window, gauzy fabric settling over her shoulders before her delicate hands pull it close, and even from here I can see the corners of her slanted eyes crinkling.

"Serah Hawke. Aren't you supposed to be out saving our fair city?"

I ignore this, because I am too busy collecting scrambled thoughts. "But soft! what light beyond yonder... er. Through? yonder window breaks...?"

When she laughs, the birds scatter indignantly, wings beating against each other in their hurry to flap away.  
The birds have terrible taste.  
"Much too early to be quoting bad poetry at me, _certainly."_

"Today is the day you'll leave with me," I plead, trying to sound as if I am not pleading at all.

Serendipity smiles, ruefully, and shakes her head.

\--

I don't remember the first time I laid eyes upon her.

"Are you sure you want to be here?" asks Fenris with his customary curl of lip, the lines etched into his flesh sparking with familiar irritability. Aveline slowly makes her way around the other side of the Rivaini, as if using her as a human shield.

"I beg your pardon," Varric, who has a significant investment in the opulent, decadent establishment in which I'd just blundered, speaks up.  
If I know Isabela -- and I think I know Isabela -- she is wondering where the dwarf demographic is. All of the merchandise is of the tall-and-willowy or muscle-bound-and-tall variety.

All about social equality, our Isabela.

"Carver suggested it," I say, to divert conversation. True to form, Isabela and Varric immediately start throwing out bets.  
"I bet he's never been here at all," quips Fenris, effectively slamming his lyrium-bound fist into the banter like a precise wrecking ball.  
I am already... _placing my order,_ as some would put it. With some lack of grace.

"Well?" Madam Lusine prompts, her nails clicking rapidly against each other as she folds her arms. "What will it be?"  
She doesn't think I can pay. The blood caked into my jerkin, the same blood at which she sneered, should have proven differently.

"I'll... just take a look around," I bleat, colour creeping up my neck. My heart thuds somewhere behind my voice box.

It's a lie. Carver didn't suggest the Blooming Rose at all.  
My _mother_ did.

I don't know what I'm doing here. It's true, I've never known what it was like to... Well, even Carver had the buxom vixen from Lothering, the one who kept trying to lure him into that little copse behind the Chantry.  
She writes him sometimes.  
Or, she used to. He never answered. So she stopped. At least, I think that's why she stopped.

But Carver is flat of chest, with that telltale thatch of hair peeking out of the neckline of his undershirt. Probably elsewhere, too, but that's something Peaches would know, not me.  
Carver is broad of arm and square of jaw and thick of hair and... well, Carver is a man. He was a man even at the age of eight, shoving his way in front of Bethany and putting already-rugged fists up in front of a fiercely scowling face.

No matter how many times I tried, I could never quite match that inalienable ferocity.

"Are you even _looking_ at the merchandise?" Isabela murmurs pointedly, nudging me right in the soft spot underneath my ribs.

\--

"It's very simple," Varric says with a gusty exhale as he lowers himself into one of the gilt-edged chairs, his fingers already fumbling for the dog-eared pack of cards in his breast pocket.  
"You think about what you like. What makes you tick. What turns you on." He withdraws the pack with two thick fingers, begins to shuffle. His eyes are on the cards, not me.  
Varric knows that I hate being seen like this. So he doesn't watch.  
"And then you look around. And whoever your eyes lock upon... you choose." The cards are whisper-quiet as they flutter between Varric's unexpectedly-deft hands. Sometimes I watch them, and I wonder. But shame dulls wonder quicker than anything else.

"I can't just _do_ that, Varric." Raspy-quiet voice, yanked from vocal cords that wish to simply scream. My hands have stopped shaking, but I still can't look up. I still can't face the fact that I'm two steps shy of bolting from a brothel. "I'm not... you. Or Isabela."

"Izzy wasn't always Izzy," the dwarf counters, swiftly laying out a hand of solitaire, then splaying his hands over them. The cards are sucked back into his grasp, and he shuffles again. "And I wasn't always me."

"Lusine informs me that you might require some... assistance."  
The voice is alien -- sultry without effort, confident without bluster, heavy without excess weight. Even Varric pauses to look up.

I am strangely not surprised when I see her face.  
I am strangely relieved.

\--

"Siobhan," I stammer under my breath, and she shakes her head, tutting softly.

"That is _not_ how you announce yourself," she admonishes, and I am duly chastened. There is command in her voice, somewhere between the soft, knowing smile that touches the edges of her lips and the crystallised edge of her molasses voice. "Your name is one of the few things you have in this world. Own it."

"It's not mine," I protest, without meaning to. Words I'd never spoken, not to Aveline, not to Fenris -- who might have understood -- not to anyone.

"Then you choose another."

She makes it sound simple, with her hands crossed over her bare knee, the slit in her silk dress leaving little leg covered. She makes it sound simple, back arched and chin lifted just so, her angular jaw and sharply-sloping nose somehow just austere enough to be heartbreakingly beautiful.

"What is _your_ name?" and it is a weak challenge, but it is the only counter I have.

"That is for me to know, and you to perhaps find out."  
It sounds more like an invitation than a shut-down.  
"For now, _Serendipity_ will do.   
Lusine seems to favour it. I am not averse."

When she leans forward, I smell jasmine and embrium and something Orlesian. I also smell her, musk and sweat and something that makes me shift perceptively in my suddenly-uncomfortable seat.  
"Now, again. What is it you wish me to call you?"

"Seanán," I whisper, and burst into tears.

\--

We don't fuck then.  
We don't even fuck the second time I see her. Or the third.

Lusine doesn't care, as long as she's paid. Serendipity doesn't care, as long as she gets to weave her crafty web around me one more time.

"What is it you do?" she asks, and this time the triangle of creamy porcelain flesh is almost too distracting to ignore. "After all, my time is... _quite_ valuable."

I colour, but by then I cannot help it. I am always some shade of too-dark red around her.  
"I... I don't really know. I walk around, and people ask me to do things for them. I guess I'm just... _that_ guy." _Better 'that' guy than no guy at all._

"Your time must be valuable as well," she responds, an eyebrow arched. I have learnt that one eyebrow means impressed or curious. Two eyebrows means surprised. She's never raised two eyebrows to anything I've said.  
Not even when I confessed that my chest was... bigger than it appeared. Or when I said I sometimes pad the front of my trousers. Or when I'd stare out the window blankly for a moment before my eyes welled up and blurred my vision.

"And your companions. An apostate and a mage-hater," and immediately I know she has watched them as closely as she has watched me. "A guard-captain amongst the lawless. A dwarf who dislikes organisation and direction so much that he makes much less money than he could. An unapologetic blood mage, in a city like Kirkwall.  
And yet, somehow you manage to keep them all together, by force of will alone. They would follow you into the dark."  
I am not sure about that.  
None of them have ever seen my dark.

"You are magnetic," she declares, and as soon as the words leave her garnet-coloured lips they are gospel.   
I would bend my knee for her voice alone.

\--

I have known her since Bloomingtide. It is now Solace, the second week.  
She has watched me from the rooftops. I have watched her from the wings.  
She has danced those delicate fingers over the calloused knuckles of my hands. I have shown her what it looked like when I smiled, crooked and uncertain and blush-touched.

Every time she calls me by name -- not Siobhan, the way Mother calls me, the way they all call me, but _Seanán,_ the name my soul sings -- my heart stammers and something tightens in a place I am known to ignore.

"I'm paying you just to talk at you," I protest, one day.

"You're paying me because I require being paid," she counters, smoothly. "I continue to see you because I wish."

"I don't even... do the... well, I don't..."

"You are not the first."

"It's not that I don't... well, I..."

I am speaking too much and saying absolutely nothing. Usually when I speak too much, Serendipity just gives me that look, that slightly-bemused smile curving her bow-shaped lips and her left eyebrow quirked just slightly.  
Sometimes she says something cryptic, like "birds of a feather, after all," or "I knew you, once," but this time she doesn't say anything at all.

Her hands are softer than I'd imagined, and her lips even more so. Belatedly I realise she's glided to where I floundered, and captured my face in her hands, and kissed me.  
Belatedly. By the time my brain registers the action, I've already convulsed, my hands fluttering to her waist and my body tensing.

When Isabela drapes her arm around me in drunken cameraderie, or Merrill locks her arms around one of mine as darkness comes slamming down over Lowtown, I tense then, too. But that is a tensing of surprise and aversion, of not wanting to be touched because secrets are revealed with the joining of bodies.

Here, enveloped in the musky smoke-tinged scent of Serendipity's chambers and the security of her softer-than-I'd-expected hands, I tense because I've never wanted to be closer to someone in my life.


	2. lovers;

"You're beautiful," I murmur under the cover of candlelit dimness. She doesn't answer, and I fear I've said something wrong. I can only see the jut of her jaw, the fall of her hair; the nuance of her expression is lost in soft shadow.

"We all are," she responds some time later. By then, my hands are already trembling, and I've already put the proverbial 'safe distance' between us.  
"All of us. Great or small. Famous or infamous. Male or female. Or... not.

Have I ever told you the story of why I came here?"  
Something in the brittleness of her tone informs me that is not "Kirkwall" she means, but "the Rose, the decadent Rose, the beautiful prison".

"I thought I could change things. Simply by being who I am. I thought people like... _Bran..._ would rethink their long-held beliefs about where I belonged if they simply... met me.  
I thought I was charming enough to be the catalyst of change."

"Me too," I whisper, but so far under my breath that Serendipity doesn't hear.

"But men like Bran like women like me to stay here. Here, in the place where anything goes and everyone plays their part. Not... in their daily lives. Not in their homes. with their mothers and their children."

There is a break in her voice, somewhere between _homes_ and _mothers,_ that makes my eyes dart up to seek hers. Her cheeks gleam, and not the same way they do when she smiles, but in the same way they do when it is raining.

"But I don't regret coming here. Because people like _Bran_ frequent brothels, yes, but every once in a while, people like..."

When I press my cheek against hers, I feel wetness that isn't mine, and that familiar shudder of _keeping-it-secret, keeping-it-safe_ that, for once, isn't coming from me.

\--

"I... you are... you make me..."

"I know."

"damn it, Serendipity, let me say it--"

"I _know."_

"but this isn't... you know this isn't my kind of... I don't usually _talk_ about this..."

" _Maker,_ Seanán."

"I'm sorry! I can't help it, I just--"

"Not that. Not... not that."

"What, then? What'd I say?"

"My...  
 _Suri._  
My name. My name is Suri."

\--

"Serendipity? As in, when you find things you weren't looking for because finding what you are looking for is so damn difficult?"  
Varric pauses, and the cards flutter out of his hands for the first time since I've met him.

"I don't know," Merrill cautions, her worried frown so small and unthreatening that I almost don't take her next words to heart.  
"Keeper Marethari describes serendipity as a perfect storm -- yes, it seems to all fall into place with precision, but it destroys with that same cunning edge."

I don't understand her then, yet I think I understand Varric just fine.

Perhaps my glasses really were just rose-coloured. Perhaps I'd forgotten how smart Merrill is.

\--

Serendipity tosses her shoulders back when she walks in, _morphing,_ becoming _Serendipity of the Manor House._ her eyes narrow just-so, spine elongating, lips curving into that cunning, slightly-derisive smirk that the nobles wore like smallclothes.

"You look as if you belong here," I remark in my surprise, feeling foolish as I hover there with my plate of sweetmeats, in my worn-seam livery.

She chuckles, and I want to think _sadly_ although I can't quite figure out why. "I know."

"I really don't like it," I confess, leading her up the stairs. Bodahn, mercifully, was absent, as was his deceptively young savant. "it's too... _big._ It's actually kind of weird."

"You were meant to wander," Serendipity adds, without preamble.

I pause outside of my bedroom door. " _Yeah._  
I mean, I like Kirkwall. but I liked Lothering, too, and I don't really miss it now that I'm gone."

"Itchy foot, they sometimes call it."

"Yeah!"

"Then go. Kirkwall will always stand on its own, somehow." When Serendipity's fingers settle on my elbow, just under the curve of bone joined to bone, I wish fervently that she were speaking truth. "You deserve better."

"Come with me," I plead for the first time, and I still hadn't opened my bedroom door.

Serendipity smiles, ruefully, and shakes her head.  
But by the time it registers, she's already snaked her hands around to the small of my back and drawn me close, closer than I'd thought possible.

\--

_Perhaps I am drowning, and that is all right, all right after all._

\--

"Come with me," I ask her every time I see her.

"Kirkwall will stand on its own. You said so yourself."

"That was for _your_ benefit, not mine." She snaps the square of fabric tighter around herself, covering more than just the delicate curviness of her body.

"You don't _need_ to stay here. We could be--"

"Have you forgotten who I am?" Maybe I hear the break in her voice. Maybe I don't. I am too overwhelmed with chagrin to think. "People like me are the epitome of the city itself. We are the lifeblood.

I am Kirkwall. Do you understand me? I represent Kirkwall's rotting dignity, its inbred shame, the blood rotting under the sigils. I _am_ Kirkwall!"

\--

We are both Kirkwall. Born in strife and bred in chaos. Suri keeps the masses placated, whilst I pretend to ease their pains and solve their dilemmas.

Varric is amused. Isabela as well, although I suspect she understands more than she lets on. Merrill smiles when she sees us, a smile that makes even the barely-visible _vallaslin_ glow. And Sebastian Vael blushes furiously as he tries not to wonder what secrets the husky-voiced whore hides under her gowns.

Me? I love her. It's all I know, and all I ever want to know. I don't care if the Knight-Commander's eyes turn red and she starts breathing fire.  
I don't care if the First Enchanter of the Circle turns out to be a blood mage himself.  
I don't care if I never make another sovereign again, playing demon's advocate in the face of irreconcilable differences.

"Today is the day you'll leave with me," I murmur into the down of Suri's hair, nuzzling the nape of her neck in that way that makes her giggle throatily and attempt to squirm out of my grasp.

"I already have," she reminds me one starless night, and I never felt more solid, more grounded, more _real_ than in that moment.


End file.
